Courage

Acts 6:8-15

This story is scary on a variety of levels, the most pronounced being the portrait of the inescapable cost of discipleship. Stephen goes from follower to deacon to martyr with terrifying speed. 

Is this what we can expect? Is this the truest essence of being faithful?

Someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer found it so. He moved from scholar to outspoken theologian to martyr in deliberate speed. The world shifted beneath his feet. His academic calling became a call to embody the will of Christ in the face of the unspeakable evil of the Nazis. The deeper he fell into the embodiment of Christ’s radical repudiation of Hitler’s agenda, the more locked he became in the inevitable that his discipleship would cost him his life. But he did not divert from the path. He followed it through. As he did so, he wrote of the reality of discipleship. He wrote of the inescapable responsibility of all who take the name of Jesus to lose themselves in that call, even if that meant losing one’s life.

Is that what we have to do to be faithful? Does God require our deaths to satisfy God’s will?

As I said--Stephen’s story is frightening.

For a while, the Church took it to heart. One of the more alarming documents from the early Church is a pastoral epistle from one of the great bishops who writes to his fellow clerics that what was needed was a series of sermons aimed at DETERRING martyrdom because far too many believers were seeking it. Conventional wisdom had become that martyrdom was the ONLY means to grace. The good bishop knew that such a mindset had the very practical consequence of shortening the history of the Church--if everyone became a martyr, there would soon be no Church--then what? So, he wrote his subject clergy, tone down the martyr theology. Preach the LIFE of faith. 

Well, we have certainly come a long way from that point. It is hard for us to imagine such a moment in church life. 

So what do we do with the story of Stephen?

We heed it.

The real point of the story is not the death of Stephen, but the faith of Stephen. He believed. Christ was all in all for him. He found happiness--albeit an ironic form of happiness that few of us would immediately embrace--but happiness, nonetheless, if we define happiness as existing within the Kingdom of God.

But what does that mean?

Here, we need to consider joy.

Joy is not bliss as our worldly gurus define it--some sort of superficial state of finding a place with no responsibilities, tugs, stress, or real connection to others, except as they make us feel happy. Joy is a state of peace, settledness, and contentment that allows us to accept our suffering as part of life without it overwhelming us because as we suffer, we also know we can find release from suffering, especially as we align ourselves with God, who is love.

That is quite a paragraph to take in.

So break it down.

God is love. God is love as God makes us, choosing to create others whom God will love, and who can live in love as they follow God, loving themselves and all whom they encounter. God is love as God redeems us, for God’s love leaves us free to make real and actual choices, some of which will be horrible or just simply wrong, getting us far from love, but God will redeem us from them by giving himself to us to release us. God is love in that God never stops being there for us or with us, reminding us always that we come from God and that God is there with grace to get us out of the messes we are in.

To make this presence of God real and actual, we live love. To know God’s treasuring of us, treasure someone. To know God’s mercy, be merciful. To know God’s abiding, abide with someone. The more we do so, the deeper we enter the presence of God. The deeper we enter the presence of God, the more we realize that suffering, pain, and sorrow are temporary. They have an end. Love does not. Knowing that is joy. 

Joy, then, gives us the ability to walk with another human being, for we know that whatever we encounter with them, all shall be well. Joy gives us the ability to risk giving ourselves to another human being, for we know that as we give ourselves, God abides, filling us. It means we can stand for love in a world that has no idea what love actually is, for God is with us, strengthening us and helping us to stay firmly in love, even as that love may be rejected. 

One of the most profound expressions of such love is marriage. In marriage, one person freely offers themselves to another human being, trusting that they do the same. The love that is the foundation of marriage is the self-emptying, self-sacrificial love that is revealed in Christ. Love creates the base from which to take the risk to fully abide with another human being. It provides the base that will give the strength to make it through the inevitable valleys of discontent, despair, and doubt that come in any deep connection. Obviously, this love goes beyond the contemporary bastardization of love that changes “til death do us part” into “til I get unhappy do us part.” Astoundingly, even something like ESPN gets this--on a recent episode of “Pardon the Interruption,” a half hour sports discussion, Mike Wilbon said that marriage is waking up one day, knowing you really don’t like your spouse, but getting through it to the next day. Yes--that’s it exactly. 

Now--that gives us a model on which to live life among ALL the people we share the planet with. We are to meet them with compassion. All of them. We are to meet them in love, risking love because it gives us the ability to find a way through conflict, corruption, and craziness. 

Stephen did so. He did so even as the audience found him so insane that the only fix they could think of was his total eradication. He never ceased to love them. 

His name we remember. The only opponent we recall by name is a bystander--a young man holding the cloaks of those doing the deed. His name was Saul, but as he witnessed Stephen’s love, that love presented itself in condemnation of his failure to love and changed him completely, inside and out. He became St. Paul because love claimed him, a reversal of identity that defies all reason.

But to get there, someone had to meet him in love.

No matter what.

Who are you ready to meet?